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Vulgarization is a noble enterprise and craft. It's bound to be less rigourous than historians' work, erroneous, prone to cliches, but also much more palatable.
by pm3003 2y ago
Vulgarization is a noble enterprise and craft. It's bound to be less rigourous than historians' work, erroneous, prone to cliches, but also much more palatable. I'd argue good vulgarisators are as important as good historians (though the author of the article makes a convincing point).
Another approach is "making science accessible". Here in France we see this at the Collège de France, with short-tenured professors providing free high-level classes and ongoing scientific research. It can be more or less easy to follow depending on the subject and professor. The easier lectures are something like Timothy Snyder's widely broadcasted lecture on the history of Ukraine.
- kragen 2y agoPopularization (the closest English equivalent word) does have to leave things out, of course. But when what it leaves out is all of the evidence, the thing that distinguishes history from mythology, it does not popularize history but debases it. (The same could be said of science popularization, which all too often amounts to science without the science.) This is not a necessary feature of popularization, but it is a necessary feature of the sensationalist, pathologically amnesic media we are discussing: podcasts and so-called "social media" like Twitter and Facebook.